A refrigerator is an electric home appliance that is used to store food in a refrigerated state or in a frozen state.
In recent years, the capacity of the refrigerator has been greatly increased, and a home bar, an ice maker, a shelf, or a door box has been mounted on the rear of a door of the refrigerator. In this type of refrigerator, when the door of the refrigerator is closed, the component mounted on the rear of the door of the refrigerator may interfere with a shelf or a drawer mounted in a storage compartment of a main body of the refrigerator.
In order to prevent such interference, the front end of a drawer (e.g. a shelf or a drawer) mounted in the storage compartment of the main body of the refrigerator (e.g. a refrigerating compartment or a freezing compartment) is located at a place spaced apart from the front of the main body of the refrigerator by a predetermined distance.
For this reason, a user must put his/her hand into the storage compartment deeply in order to take out food stored in the drawer. Furthermore, it is difficult for the user to check the food stored in the rear portion of the storage compartment. These problems become more critical as the size of the refrigerator is increased.
Various methods have been proposed to solve the above problems. For example, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2010-0130357 (hereinafter, referred to as '357 patent) discloses a refrigerator configured to have a structure in which a shelf or a drawer mounted in a refrigerating compartment or a freezing compartment is disposed at a receiving frame, the front end of an articulated link is connected to the bottom surface of a refrigerator door, and the rear end of the articulated link is connected to the receiving frame. When the refrigerator door is turned and opened, therefore, the receiving frame is moved forward, with the result that the shelf or the drawer is moved forward.
In the refrigerator having the above structure, the load of the shelf and the load of the drawer are transferred to the receiving frame. In other words, the load of the shelf, the load of the drawer, and the load of food stored in the shelf and the drawer are concentrated on the receiving frame. For this reason, it is important to design the receiving frame such that the receiving frame can sufficiently support the loads. In this case, however, the structure of the receiving frame is complicated and the volume of the receiving frame is increased, whereby the weight of the receiving frame is also increased. Furthermore, the capacity of the storage compartment is reduced due to the space occupied by the receiving frame.
In order to solve the above problem, it is necessary to separately provide a support means for supporting the shelf or the drawer and a withdrawal means for moving the shelf or the drawer. However, reaction force due to the action and reaction between the withdrawal means and the shelf (or the drawer) is applied to the withdrawal means and the shelf (or the drawer) when the shelf or the drawer is withdrawn by the withdrawal means even in the case in which the load of the shelf or the drawer is not applied to the withdrawal means by the provision of the support means. In particular, reaction force due to the inertia of the shelf or the drawer is applied to the withdrawal means, with the result that the withdrawal means may become deformed.
In addition, in the case in which the support means and the withdrawal means are separately provided, the withdrawal means may be moved more smoothly than the receiving frame disclosed in '357 patent. However, the withdrawal means may easily shake due to the relatively low inertia thereof.